WASHINGTON
(AP) -- Eric Holder talks about the nation's civil rights struggles in a way no
previous U.S. attorney general could - by telling his own family story.

As
he increasingly pushes his Justice Department to protect voting rights and end
unfair prison sentences and police brutality, Holder has drawn on personal
history to make the case that the nation has much work to do to achieve justice
for all. It's a legacy he'll likely draw on when he travels Wednesday to
Ferguson, Missouri, to supervise the federal investigation of the fatal
shooting of a black 18-year-old by a white police officer.

Holder
tells how his father, an immigrant from Barbados proudly wearing his World War
II uniform, was ejected from a whites-only train car. How his future
sister-in-law, escorted by U.S. marshals, integrated the University of Alabama
in spite of a governor who stood in the schoolhouse door to block her. How as a
college student, he was twice pulled over, his car searched, even though he
wasn't speeding.

And
Holder recalls that the slaying of black teen Trayvon Martin in 2012 prompted
him to sit down with his own 15-year-old son for a talk about the way a young
black male must act and speak if confronted by police - the same talk his
father had given him decades earlier.

"I
had to do this to protect my boy," the nation's first black attorney
general said at an NAACP convention last year.

President
Barack Obama is sending Holder to Ferguson to bring the full weight of the
federal government into the investigation of the death of another young black
man, Michael Brown, who was unarmed when a white police officer shot him
multiple times Aug. 9. Daily and nightly protests, sometimes marred by rioting
and looting and met with tear gas and rubber-coated bullets from police, have
rocked the suburban St. Louis community since.

In
an open letter published late Tuesday on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch website,
Holder promised a thorough investigation into the Brown shooting while calling
for "an end to the acts of violence in the streets of Ferguson."

"The
Justice Department will defend the right of protesters to peacefully
demonstrate and for the media to cover a story that must be told," Holder
wrote. "But violence cannot be condoned. I urge the citizens of Ferguson
who have been peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights to join with
law enforcement in condemning the actions of looters, vandals and others
seeking to inflame tensions and sow discord."

Holder
has led an unusually fast and aggressive Justice Department response to the
local case, sending teams of prosecutors and dozens of FBI agents to
investigate and arranging a federal autopsy on top of one by local authorities.

Still,
protesters in the streets say they aren't convinced justice will be done.
Holder's record on civil rights and personal commitment may help reassure the
community when he visits.

"It's
a powerful message," said William Yeomans, a law school fellow at American
University who worked in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division for
more than two decades. "He's the embodiment of law enforcement, and the
positive contribution he can make here is to assure the community that the
federal government is taking very seriously the quest for justice in this
incident."

Holder
reinvigorated a civil rights force at Justice, Yeomans said, that had been
scaled back and demoralized during President George W. Bush's administration.

Holder's
department has been especially strong in going after police misconduct, both
through criminal civil rights cases and lawsuits against police departments,
Yeomans said.

His
civil rights push got off to a difficult start, however.

Shortly
after taking office in February 2009, Holder called the United States "a
nation of cowards" when it comes to talking about race in a Black History
Month speech. Conservative backlash was swift. Holder quickly toned down his
rhetoric while quietly rebuilding the division.

For
much of Holder's early tenure, his public profile was shaped by battles over
how to prosecute terror cases, the use of armed drones to kill terror suspects
overseas and his handling of various Obama administration controversies. A 2012
vote in the Republican-controlled House made Holder the first sitting Cabinet
member ever held in contempt of Congress over his refusal to hand over without
preconditions documents involving the Fast and Furious gun investigation.

More
than a dozen Republican lawmakers have called for his impeachment for not
prosecuting anyone in the Internal Revenue Service for targeting conservative
groups and for his department's probes of journalists linked to news leaks.

But
over the last three years, civil rights has moved to the forefront, starting
with Holder's opposition to state voter ID laws that make it harder for the
poor to cast ballots. He compared Texas' voter ID law to a poll tax, the
now-illegal fees imposed across the South for decades to block
African-Americans from voting. The Justice Department is now suing Texas and
North Carolina over their voting restrictions.

"Over
the past three years, the department's Civil Rights Division has filed more
criminal civil rights cases than during any other period in its history -
including record numbers of hate-crimes cases," Holder noted in April.

Holder
has indicated he's unlikely to stay on as attorney general through the end of
Obama's second term, but says he has more to accomplish before departing. That
may partly explain his accelerated push for equal treatment under the law.

He
has worked on easing mandatory sentences, especially for nonviolent drug
offenses that have a disproportionate impact on black men.

Holder
ordered his prosecutors to stop charging many drug defendants with offenses
that carry mandatory minimum sentences, pushed a U.S. Sentencing Commission
proposal to lower guideline penalties and backed legislation to give judges
more discretion in sentencing.

"This
focused reliance on incarceration is not just financially unsustainable,"
he said in March, "it comes with human and moral costs that are impossible
to calculate."

He
used the Martin killing two years ago to criticize "stand your
ground" gun laws in states like Florida. The Justice Department is
investigating the 17-year-old's death but has yet to say if it will file
federal civil rights charges against George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch
volunteer who said he killed Martin in self-defense and was acquitted in a
state trial.

Holder
even partnered with the Education Department to try to change the so-called
"school-to-prison pipeline," where minority children - especially
black students - are suspended and expelled at a rate that's three times higher
than that of white children.

Ragin its funny for the last two days I've been doing research on Holder and I wasn't aware of how hard he's pushing to make the playing field equal for black. I wanted to post this article I read on Politico about how he is basically the one who says what Obama is saying behind closed doors. Axelrod and them wanted him out after that "nation of cowards" speech but no matter who comes at him Obama won't even entertain the idea of him leaving. They argue behind closed doors about how to address racism but share the same passion about it.

I'm not sure what he's going to do but these revealing stories about him over the past week have given me hope that this may be the catalyst that let's him off the leash.

He often talks about the disrespect shown to him and POTUS as being unprecedented. He specifically said its because they're black.

So I think St Louis and Ferguson officials are going to be very disrespectful to him. He's not scared of them though. Obama will forgive him if he goes off. Apparently when his aides complain about Holder handling race issues so bluntly Obama is like "And?"

What I'm saying is let Obama deal with Iraq and the Israeli-Palestine conflict. I think he put the right person on the case for now.

Politicians never do a damn thing about how they do us but I'm trying hard to believe Eric will put a little fear on those fckrs.

I am very, very happy that he's making a dent in the Prison Industrial Complex by taking away one of their slimiest tricks to support mass incarceration. I don't even know if black people understand the impact that has. But anytime the Republicans are furious about something its probably in our favor

today on msnbc they're talking about the large disparity amongst black representation in elected officials and the police force in ferguson.

i wonder how many black people applied for positions within the police department? i think that information would be telling.

Its a misconception that black folk do not wish to join the police departments in their respective communities. The fact remains that nearly half of black males have criminal records in this country and 1 in 3 will go to prison in their lifetime. Consequently, many of us (myself included) are ineligible to be considered for employment by law enforcement under many jurisdictional standards. You think black folk wouldn't want a good job, with benefits and a pension, na its the institutional impediments that have mainly stood in the way of US being able to police US

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